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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. Any of numerous reptiles of the suborder Sauria or Lacertilia, characteristically having a scaly elongated body, movable eyelids, four legs, and a tapering tail.
  2. n. Leather made from the skin of one of these reptiles.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A scaly four-legged reptile without a shell; a squamate quadruped saurian; a saurian or lacertilian. In popular language a lizard is almost any reptile except a frog, toad, snake, or turtle; and ordinary book usage is equally indefinite. Thus, skinks, stellios, geckos, chameleons, basilisks, monitors, agamas, iguanas, alligators, crocodiles, etc., are all lizards; pterodactyls are flying-lizards; dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs are huge extinct lizards. But the word is most frequently used as the name of the small lacertilians, as those of the family Lacertidæ and some others, which have no special names of their own. See Lacerta, Lacertidæ.
  2. n. Any member of the old order Sauria or modern order Lacertilia. Such are the reptiles known as slow-worms, glass-snakes, horned toads, etc. Many of these have no limbs, or no obvious ones, and are therefore not lizards in sense 1.
  3. n. Nautical, a piece of rope with a thimble or bull's-eye spliced into one or both ends, used in a vessel as a leader for ropes.
  4. n. [capitalized] A certain small constellation. See Lacerta, 2.
  5. n. A crotch of timber or a forked limb used in place of a sled for hauling stone: a form of stone-boat.
  6. n. In heraldry, a beast like a wildcat, usually represented as spotted: a rare bearing.
  7. n. The thorn-tailed lizard, Uromastix acanthinurus.

Wiktionary

  1. n. Any reptile of the order Squamata, usually having four legs, external ear openings, movable eyelids and a long slender body and tail.
  2. n. Lizard skin, the skin of these reptiles.
  3. n. An unctuous person.
  4. n. A coward.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. Any one of the numerous species of reptiles belonging to the order Lacertilia; sometimes, also applied to reptiles of other orders, as the Hatteria.
  2. n. A piece of rope with thimble or block spliced into one or both of the ends.
  3. n. A piece of timber with a forked end, used in dragging a heavy stone, a log, or the like, from a field.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. relatively long-bodied reptile with usually two pairs of legs and a tapering tail
  2. n. a man who idles about in the lounges of hotels and bars in search of women who would support him

Etymologies

  1. Middle English, from Old French lesarde, from Latin lacertus, lacerta.

Examples

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‘lizard’ has been looked up 1135 times, added to 17 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 16.